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SOLUTIONS

Xena is a full-featured software platform for managing both the business and technical aspects of semiconductor IP.

For IP companies, Xena provides a complete operations platform for delivering and supporting products. For semiconductor companies, Xena provides an enterprise-level platform for managing, tracking, and controlling both your internal IP and all of the IP you purchase from suppliers.

Managing Semiconductor IP is Complex

As every IP manager knows, IP is a messy business. Here are some of the challenges that all semiconductor companies face when dealing with internal and external IP.
Xena helps you manage all of these issues and evolves with your business to keep up with new complexities as they emerge.

Key Features and Benefits

Enterprise Grade Catalog

Many companies employ an “IP Yellow Pages” or similar private website that lists the IP that is available for use within the company.
Xena takes this to a whole new level, fully integrating the catalog feature with many other types of metadata that is part of IP reuse. Xena’s IP catalog features include:

Summary view of available IPs with descriptions as brief or detailed as you want.

Full text search as well as search by user-defined categories (such as digital, analog, software) or user-defined attributes (such as maturity and silicon process).

Ability to attach collateral (datasheets, compliance reports, and so on) to each IP title so users have access to all the information they need in a single place.

Ability to restrict viewing of specific content on a user-by-user basis using a concept called “passports”.

You can see a large public IP catalog in the Core Store, which is built on the Xena platform.

Release Management

Managing releases of IP is important; you need to maintain control of your IP to know which versions of the IP are being used in chips.
Xena is not a replacement for design management (DM) software like GIT, Subversion, or Clearcase. Xena is used in connection with the DM system of your choice, allowing you to:

Capture and lock from your DM system the precise version of the IP that you want in your designers' hands.

Specify where users can access the IP, either inside Xena or an any external location of your choosing (including your DM system itself).

Add errata, release notes, and other information that you want your users to see.

Specify the “state” of the IP, such as “development”, “released”, or “obsolete” so that the status of the IP is clear to users.

Automatically notify affected users when new releases of IP become available.

Access Control

Xena provides a license model that precisely controls who has access to the IP, which contract the IP use is associated with, and which device(s) are authorized to use the IP. A significant amount of metadata is packed around the access to IP:

List of users who can download or access the support system in connection to that IP.

Visibility into the maintenance and support terms, including the ability for managers to receive alerts and reports regarding expiring maintenance, support, and even warranties.

Ability to track downloads to see which users accessed the IP and when they accessed it.

Contracts

Xena provides a comprehensive model for keeping track of IP contracts, allowing all the relevant information about an IP license to be kept in one place and tied into the Xena data model. Here are just some of the things that are captured by default in Xena:

Access period, which can be a range of dates for a subscription type license or perpetual for contracts that are of a per-use or unlimited-use type.

Maintenance, support, and warranty periods.

Use restrictions, such as forbidding use in certain countries, or any other area.

Payment terms.

Milestones for IP contracts that specify achieving a milestone as a condition of payment.

Support

Xena provides a full-featured support infrastructure that makes it easy for you to help your users. The key features of the support system are the:

Ability for your users to open tickets against IP for which they have a license (and an active support agreement), allowing them to assign each issue a type (bug, question, support) and severity (high, medium, low).

Ability for you to assign specific experts in your company to specific products, then assign support obligations to people in that group on a per-license basis. For example, if your customer is in Asia, you can assign the right person on your team in Asia to support that customer for that IP product.

Ability for your support team to log private comments and log support effort so that you have a record of the efforts you are expending.

Ability to send important notifications to customers as a whole, by company, by license, or by product.

Ability to securely share files (test cases, screenshots, and so on) without the need for extra encryption.

Ability to monitor user activity, such as seeing when a user downloads an IP package, creates a ticket, or shares a file.

Ability to track the entire support history of a particular support issue.

Devices

Xena provides also provides a comprehensive model to store information about devices that contain IP licensed to them. As with all Xena features, the elements of the device model flow into other elements of Xena to provide a fully-integrated system that includes all the data associated with IP use. The device information contained can be customized (like most of Xena), but out of the box, the following types of information are captured:

Name of the device, internal names, process, foundry, node and other basic information to describe the device at a high level.

The IP that is contained in the device.

The contracts associated with the device.

Milestones associated with the project, such as project start, tape-out, and EOL. These milestones are useful when coupled with the milestones specified in contracts so that when a project manager marks a device milestone complete, it may serve as an authorization to make a contractual payment.

Reporting and Charts

Xena can hold a lot of data. And that data needs be accessed easily so users can get the information they need quickly. Xena can produce a variety of reports and we are constantly implementing new reports that our customers ask for. Reports availble today include:

Support

Tickets

Devices

Licenses

Financial

Products

Users

Contracts

Milestones

Each of these reports can use custom filters to provide the exact information you are looking for. You can also save report setup information so that you can easily rerun the reports in the future.

Fingerprinting and DNA analysis

The newest Xena feature provides you with the ability to analyze your chip design database to detect which IP is present there. More information about fingerprinting and DNA analysis technology can be found on the Core Store, where this capability is also available to non-Xena customers.

As a Xena Hybrid or Xena Enterprise customer, you can perform fingerprinting of your own IP and DNA analysis on your own Xena server.

Which Xena is Right for You?

Every business is different and we’ve designed three Xena offerings to match your needs and give you the flexibility to pick the solution that's right for you.

Xena Cloud is a hosted version of Xena, which Silvaco manages in the cloud for you. Customers pay just $200 per-user per-month. Administrators of the system can provide non-administrators in their companies with unlimited access to Xena’s customer features (catalog, IP access, support) for no extra charge. Xena Cloud is fully featured in every way and is the best option for companies that want to try Xena to see if it is a fit for their company.

Xena Hybrid is a customer-hosted version of Xena for customers who don
t want to manage their data in the cloud. The Xena Hybrid server resides on the customer’s computer located in the DMZ area of their network, allowing Silvaco to maintain the Xena software and the company's administrators to manage their company’s data. There is an annual subscription fee and the same per-user fee as Xena Cloud.

Xena Enterprise is a customer-hosted and customer-administered version of Xena for large companies that want to completely control their Xena system and customize it to their particular needs. There is an annual subscription fee and an unlimited number of administrators with no per-user subscription like Xena Cloud and Xena Hybrid.

Product Features

Enabled features

All

All

All

Catalog categories/attributes

Standard

Customizable

Customizable

Fingerprinting/DNA Analysis

No

Pay-as-You-Go

Unlimited

Available roles

All

All

All

Hosting Model

Hosting site

Cloud

Company (in DMZ)

Company

System administration

Silvaco

Silvaco

Company

Domain/URL

*.xena-cloud.com

Any

Any

Licensing Model

Xena software license fee

None

Mini Subscription

Full Subscription

Cost/member user

$200/mo.

$200/mo.

Included

For more information, including pricing and instructions for purchasing your Xena license, contact ip@silvaco.com.